AI War:1.008 Release

-Capturable ships do not come under player control until a command station is finished being built (previously they came under control as soon as it started being built, which is when planet control changes).

-When a command station is finished being built, there is now a 50% chance that any local enemy guards might desert their posts. This is in addition to the existing 50% chance when the enemy command station is lost.

-"Unknown Path" no longer flashes next to each planet on the galaxy map before the actual number of hops are calculated.

-The metal, crystal, and energy costs of parasites have been doubled. This is to compensate for all the "free" ships that parasites capture. For the similar reasons of balance the range of parasites has also been cut in half. They are still deadly, but this takes the edge off of them so that they are not too overpowered.

-Queuing up any waypoint or attack commands no longer clears the wormhole travel path for ships. Any queued commands will be executed, and then the ships will go on their wormhole travel path. This also had the side effect of finally fixing the movement bug reported by Quitch.

-Two new hotkeys: F9 and F10. They let players toggle off or on the "far zoom" icons.

-The selection radius for the Advanced Research Station was too small. Fixed.

-Previously, sometimes the Auto-placement of harvesters would fail in situations where the manual placement would succeed. Fixed.

-It is now possible for ships to stay in attack-move mode or free-roaming-defender mode when moving between planets. If there is an allied command station on the destination side, they will move there, otherwise they will move just inside the wormhole. These new kinds of move commands work from the galaxy map or the main planetary view. This also works with setting constructors in attack-move or FRD mode, and setting their gather point on another planet (produced ships will emerge in the target mode, and go to the destination planet while staying in that mode).

-The options to force software sound/music mixing have been removed, as they are not actually needed.

-The settings screen now has options for setting specific zoom and pan speeds.

-There is a new "Extra Tooltip Font Size" option in the settings screen, which allows some of the font sizes in the game to be increased or decreased. More may be done with this in the future.

-A new "Omit Numerals From Mark I Ship Icons" option has been added to the settings screen.

-There is a new "Show Intel Summary By Cursor" option in the settings screen.

-The overzoom border is now displayed better on large/wide monitors, or those monitors with an unusual resolution.

-There is now a "Show Details" option in the Save and Load menus, which lets players see the dates of each savegame. The Details view also has sortable columns, and the game remembers whether the user last used Details or normal view.

-The backslash key now selects the first idle ship from the current selection.

-Fixed a very rare bug where blocked shots could cause enemy ships to become unshootable because of how their total damage was too high.

-The amount of collected knowledge at the current planet is now shown over top of all science labs (like Exhausted shows), and in the popup menu for quick-selection of science labs. This makes science labs quicker and easier to check the status of.

-The filter for Mobile Military in the galaxy map was incorrectly calculating the values for Allies and Team. Fixed.

-A bug with astro trains commonly just hanging out at their train stations should now be fixed.

-The hover-tips now work while waiting for players in a multiplayer game.

-Minor fixes to the tutorial text.

-When a tractor beam grabs a ship that is already fading out through a wormhole, the graphics no longer briefly glitch on the far side of the wormhole.

-Mark II engineers now have 10x the range for doing repairs, which makes them able to repair ships at the center of larger groups.

-The status messages regarding engineers (in the hover-text of the engineers quick button) are now more informative about what the engineers are up to).

-EtherJet Tractors will now approach their target until they have grappled it (if it can be grappled), rather than just until they are in firing distance.

-A new ship, Wormhole Command Posts, has been added for the AI. This ship is completely invisible and cannot be revealed, like the Mark IV scout for the human players. These command posts let the AI do reinforcements right at their wormholes, like a player would. The command posts are destroyed only when the central command station for the planet is destroyed. These are automatically inserted into older savegames.

-The AI will now send some of its reinforcements to wormhole command posts on planets at which it otherwise would not reinforce. This should make sustained deep raids into enemy territory a lot more difficult.

-The AI will no longer use Scout Starships against the players.

-Scouts have been rebalanced in response to the AIs now protecting wormholes better. Mark I and Mark II now have cloaking (so that all scouts now have cloaking), and they also thus no longer have any shields (no cloaking ships have shields). The health of the armored scout has thus been quadrupled, and the health of the Mark III scout has been doubled. Mark I and II scouts also no longer have any weapons (Mark III and IV already did not), so they will never accidentally decloak themselves in order to attack an enemy ship.

-The AI will now intentionally route its special forces ships to any core or home planets that are under attack.

-If the AI players have different tech levels, they will now both be shown in the AI Progress section, rather than just showing one of them.

-Since the new style of AI Progress was introduced, the AI players were getting new ship types at much too fast a rate. Fixed.

-Items in the build queue that are delayed for being finished will no longer show negative time estimates.

-Cloaked ships (controlled by players or the AI) will no longer auto-attack targets unless they are in attack-move mode or free-roaming defender mode. Instead they will only attack the targets that they are issued by the player. This helps to preserve their cloaked state, and gives them a combat edge in many situations (such as raids into enemy territory).

-When initially loading a savegame, sometimes the AI tech levels would be slightly off until the player did something new to affect the overall AI progress.

-Engineers and Mine Layers would previously stop to perform other duties when given a wormhole command by players. Fixed.

-When issuing an assist order to an engineer, or a "get in transport" command to any ships, if the free-roaming defender mode or attack-move mode buttons were held, the ships would not get into that mode. Fixed.

-Previously, science labs would not display as exhausted until they were finished being constructed. Fixed.

-The planetary summary now includes icons for the control groups the player has set. The icon shows up as blue if any ships from that control group are at the current planet, or as white if not. Hovering over the icon allows players to see exactly what and how many ships are in the control group, and how many of each are on the current planet vs elsewhere. Left and right clicking this icon works just like the other buttons in the planetary summary, simply selecting or selecting and centering on all ships of the clicked control group (on the local planet only).

-Previously, if a selected mobile builder was killed, players could keep building turrets if they were already building them. Fixed.

-In recent releases (1.007 and on), maps that are 80 planets or larger were creating far too many data centers and advanced research stations on each map, making the game much easier than it otherwise would be. Fixed.

-When a munitions booster's object goes out of range, dies, or switches planets, the munitions booster now reacts to this more quickly and removes the link.

-Ships that are unable to hurt shield bearers will no longer auto-attack them as targets. This makes shield bearers less of a targeting distraction in battles.

-Previously, the AI would just stop dead and not know what to do if the only enemy ships on a planet were fully cloaked. Now the AI will ignore them as if they were not even there, instead of waiting around for them to decloak.

-Since version 1.006, the Astro Trains were sometimes stopping permanently at train stations. Now they might stop for a little while, but they will quickly resume travel like they used to before some of the waypoint shifts.

-When ships controlled by the human team are only partially-cloaked, they now no longer show the cloaking graphic under them. This makes it clear when ships are at least visible enough to be shot, versus being fully cloaked and unshootable (before the difference between fully cloaked and partially cloaked for your own team's ships was imperceptible—now the difference between partially-cloaked and decloaked is imperceptible, but when it is a ship you control there is no gameplay difference between these two states, anyway).

-Engineers now only clear mines when there is nothing else for them to do inside their search range.

-A total count has been added to the new Control Group icon tooltips.

-Mines are now immune to blade-based ships (vampire and cutlass), which will prevent those ships from attacking mines (and dying) when the mines are visible.

-There was previously a desync that could be caused in multiplayer if one player was looking at a force field when new ships were added or the force field went down, and other players were not. Fixed.

-Wormhole Command Posts are now positioned on the wormhole they are guarding, rather than to the side.

-The metal/crystal cost of Mark II Science Labs has been much reduced, and their shields have been reduced from 2500 to 1500.

-The range of all the tachyon beam emitter variants have been increased.

-Both the counter-shooter range and the attack range is now shown during ship placement mode for ships that have both (like Fortresses).

-The position of the attack ranges during ship placement mode was drawn slightly off. This was only notable for very large ships, like Fortresses. Fixed.

-Until now, the AI was not properly limiting its reinforcements based on the tech level of each reinforcement. Now it is, which means that the hugely vast numbers of ships on the final planets are somewhat less likely to occur, making things a bit more equivalent for players when they get there (given equal AI progress). On the other hand, the AI will now build Mark V ships on the home and core planet command posts during reinforcements, whereas before it only build Mark IV ships there. The overall balance shift should be a bit in favor of the human players, which is good given the other behavior changes in this release in favor of the AI.

-Previously, when a constructor had a cross-planet gather point, resetting the gather point to the current planet would not work. Fixed.

-The AI alert level is now shown in the intel summary of enemy planets. This shows if the AI is likely to reinforce or not at a given planet, based on how aware it is of your presence. The border color of the enemy ship icons and planet icons on the galaxy map will also turn crimson when the AI is on alert and prepared to reinforce at a given planet.

-When players have a negative crystal or metal income rate, they are now still allowed to build more ships. Previously, it stopped them from doing so.

-Previously, when players had a negative crystal or metal rate, it would show +- in the top of the hud, rather than just -. Fixed.

-Mark I through III scouts now have a "cloaking booster" ability, which lets them work better in groups. When scouts are traveling in groups, some of them will boost the cloaks of the others, which protects the boosted scouts from being revealed by tachyon beam emitters. The scouts doing the boosting cannot themselves be boosted, which means that some of the scouts are likely to be picked off or at least damaged at every tachyon beam emitter that is passed. Higher-level scouts can boost multiple ships at once, and also have a bigger boost range.

-The cost of the Missile Silo has been reduced from 100k metal and crystal to only 25k metal and crystal. The missiles are still just as expensive, but having the silo be less expensive creates less of a barrier for players to at least try out missiles.

-The range of mobile repair stations is now 10x its prior value, for similar reasons as to the Mark II engineer.

-Scout Starships are now treated like other scouts and are not selected when the selection box includes military ships.

-EyeBots now have cloaking and the cloaking booster ability.

-The health of lightning missiles has been doubled, and they are now immune to missiles, blades, and can pass under force fields. Armored missiles did not get a health bonus, but got all the other improvements.

-The MLRS Turret II technology no longer depends on the Missile Turret tech having been unlocked.

-When ships fully recloak, any incoming shots don't hit them.

FIXES FROM PAST PRERELEASES

Took out the following, since it was just overpowered and unexpected: "-Ships guarding "core" AI planets will now come to the aid of a core AI command station that is under attack, attempting to prevent the AI player from going out of the game. If they succeed in killing the ships on the AI home planet, they will then turn on the human players, so this can be extremely dangerous and even game-ending if not handled carefully. This behavior is so potentially deadly that it will only be used by AIs of difficulty 7 or higher."

SPECIAL THANKS

Thanks to Revenantus for suggesting the improvement to when capturable ships are captured, for reporting the issue with mobile builder death, for inspiring the "cloaking booster" feature.

Thanks to darke for suggesting a rebalancing of parasites, for reporting the issue with the advanced research station selection radius, for reporting the issue with the auto-placement of harvesters, for reporting the AI's new difficulty with harvester attacks, for suggesting the update to Mark II Engineers, for suggesting the increases in tachyon range, for suggesting the improvement to mobile repair stations, for suggesting that scout starships not be selected with other mobile military ships, for suggesting the improvements to lightning missiles, for suggesting the change to the prerequisite for MLRS Turret II.

Thanks to yllamana for inspiring the improvements to how commands are queued before wormhole movement commands.

Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the F9 and F10 toggles, for suggesting the Omit Numerals option, for suggesting the new Show Intel Summary By Cursor option.

Thanks to Quitch for suggesting the zoom/pan speed sliders, for suggesting the Details view on Save/Load menus, for reporting the graphical issue with tractor beams and wormholes, for suggesting the engineers quick button text improvement, for suggesting full row select on the details view of save/load, for inspiring the Wormhole Command Posts, for inspiring the change to the AI progress display, for reporting the issue with the build queue estimated times going negative, for reporting the issue with the AI progress being a bit off at load, for reporting the issues with engineers and mine layers disobeying wormhole move orders, for reporting the issue with engineers and free-roam/attack-move modes when given assist orders, for reporting the issue with science labs not showing as exhausted until fully constructed, for suggesting the change to engineer mine remain cleaning, for suggesting the total count in the control group icon tooltips, for reporting the issue with vampires attacking visible mines, for reporting the issue with the attack ranges being off with fortresses, for reporting the issue with cross-planet gather points.

Thanks to keith.lamothe for suggesting the backslash functionality.

Thanks to vendolis for reporting the minor issues with the tutorial text.